Wiring Ethernet Extensions: How to Fit Sockets & Make Patch Leads

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time i'm going to show you how to wire ethernet extensions by this i mean both making a patch lead like this as well as fitting new ethernet sockets so let's go and get started when wiring an ethernet extension it's really important to select the right cable all decent cables will have their specification printed on them as we can see here with these cables that i'm about to use in my own project specifically i bought this cable to make a 20 meter permanent extension to my garage your garage depending how you want to pronounce it there's about 50 meters of cable here i only need about 20 at least for this project and i've also found in my box of supplies this cable which i'm going to use to make some ethernet patch leads to connect computers to ethernet sockets so let's run through how we select the right cable firstly we need to choose the right category or cat network cables on the market today range from cap 5 to cat 8 and the higher the category the faster the data transfer speed the cable can support as we can see cap 5 cable is limited to 100 megabits per second and as most ethernet devices today support a speed of 1 000 megabits or 1 gigabit cap 5 should generally be avoided unless you're absolutely certain you'll need 100 megabit connection meanwhile cap 5e or category 5 enhanced does support one gigabit speed and is therefore an acceptable choice for many patch cables this said when installing permanent cabling the minimum choice today should be cat 6 or above to allow for future equipment upgrades here the cable i'm using for my garage extension is cat 6 which will support up to 10 gigabits across the 20 meter length i'm going to fit although right now all of my equipment is one gigabit and my internet connection about 15 megabits so this cable is very well specified for the task in hand meanwhile my patch lead cable is cat 7 although not of the same connection quality in other respects as we're about to see beyond the category ranking a second important consideration is whether a cable is solid or stranded core in an ethernet cable data is carried in eight wires which are arranged in four twisted pairs as we can see in solid core cable each wire in each twisted pair is a single cylinder of metal whereas in stranded core cable each wire consists of several strands generally solid core cables act as better conductors and have better electrical characteristics and so are the best choice for long cable runs and permanent installations and so the cable here for my garage extension this is a solid core cable on the other hand stranded core cables like this one are more flexible they've got a smaller bending radius which makes them a better choice for making up the patch cables that link computers to network sockets the third thing to be aware of is that the wires and different ethernet cables come with different wire thicknesses which typically range from 23 to 28 awg or american wire gauge with the smaller number indicating a thicker wire so when wiring permanent extensions go for the smallest awg value you can with this being particularly important if you want to run power as well as data down your cable using poe or power over ethernet however if you want to make up the most flexible short patch leads use a high awg value cable and so here my stranded core cable for my patch leads this is awg28 quite a thin wire but my solid core cable is awg24 it's got much sticker wires inside cable a fourth thing to be aware of there are even more things to consider when picking a cable is that not all cables have their wires made from the same conductors with common choices being solid copper copper-clad aluminium known as cca or copper cad steel known as ccs here solid copper offers the best connectivity but is more expensive but once again when fitting a permanent cable go for solid copper if possible and so here this cable is solid copper and it itself as such in contrast this cable over here my patch cable doesn't tell us what it's made of nothing printed on the steel to indicate what the conductor is i would guess it is probably cca copper clad aluminium a fifth thing to consider when choosing cables is whether or not the wires inside the cable are shielded to avoid interference from other electrical items cap 5 cable is never shielded while cat 6a and above always are meanwhile cat 6 is sometimes shielded and sometimes not as this table indicates shielding comes in many different varieties that indicate whether the whole cable is shielded and or its inner twisted pairs in general the more shielding the better although in most domestic situations shielding is not that critical unless you know that your cable will run their main electrical items such as say washing machines or generators that are likely to produce electrical interference here my cat 7 cable is sfftp with an outer braided shield and an outer foil as well as shielded twisted pairs but my cat6 cable is not shielded and i'm not worried about this as this cable will mainly run outside nowhere anything else electrical talking of outside a sixth and final consideration is whether you need a cable for internal or external use here my patch lead cable is internal as you may suspect but my garage extension cable this is not just rated for external use it's rated for direct burial and for this purpose it has two separate plastic covers the out one made from hdpe and the inner from pvc so it'll hopefully be well protected in the ground and so there we are and i bet you never thought there were so many things i could tell you about network cable but if you are fitting a permanent ethernet connection in particular it's critical to get the cable right and i hope that for me this cat6 solid core solid copper awg24 direct burial cable will prove a good long-term choice in people's homes ethernet cables are most commonly terminated in an rj45 plug or a wall socket as we can see a wall socket is a modular unit and this clips into the type of wall plate you use in your country this is a uk wall plate we can clip it in here like this there we are and this gives us an rj45 socket as you can see down in there but also there's a little nameplate here which i've already labeled for my project and after this is wired up it gets screwed into a pattern or fitting box either a metal box like this which is mounted directly in the wall or you might use a surface mounted box like this transitioning across to the things we put into sockets rj45 plugs come in various types for example shielded or non-shielded as we've got here and they can either be one-piece plugs like these or they can be multi-piece and they normally come with some sort of a protective sleeve which goes on the back of the plug as you can see here plugs like this can also be passed through or non-pass through and here we have one of each the difference is the pass-through plugs have holes in the end through which the wires will pass when they're being connected before being cut off as we'll shortly see to wire up both plugs and sockets some tools are needed and as a minimum to wire a socket you'll need a punch down tool like this which also serves as a wire stripper meanwhile to connect plugs you will need a crimping tool something like this a very exciting device various types are available and most crimpers also offer wire cutting and wire stripping functionality and if you're going to use pass-through plugs your life will be so much easier if you get a crimping tool like this one which has got a special blade down here which is designed to cut off the pass-through cables to trim them off neatly when you're crimping the plug many of the tools are also available often in kits with a crimping tool but a follow what i point out that can be very useful to have is one of these this is a cable tester where you can plug your cables in the top just to check you wire things up correctly right let's now wire up our socket and i'm going to do this as a demonstration with it securely fastened down to my workbench to make things easier to film here i'm working with our solid core cable i'm going to bring in my crimping tool just initially just to cut off the end to make it nice and leaf-like that that's a nice neat end i only produced that bit like that to show you different wires earlier on we now need to strip off a couple of inches of the outer protection here so i'm going to put it into the right place in the crimping tool you could use another wire stripping tool i'm going to use my crimping tool i now need to go down nine clicks on this i think that should be the right number and now we just have to rotate around we'll do a couple of rotations like that maybe three for good measure there we are and hopefully if that is correct yes that will take off the outer protection the two layers of outer protection on this particular cable and that's a ready to use and it's always a very good idea at this point in time to really inspect the cable carefully just to check you've not cut the twisted pairs and everything here seems to be okay so i'm just going to separate the cables out a little bit because there's a central divider in this cable as you can see central piece of plastic that has to go so we'll just get these out of our way bring in a little pair of nail scissors and carefully just get that cut out there we are like that and we're now ready to go back to the socket where we need to decide how to wire it up and i say decide that there are two termination standards in use known as t568a and t568b these are set by the telecommunications industry association or tiaa and you can use either one providing that you're consistent and use the same standard at each end when wiring an extension socket or patch cable many sources suggest that t568a is preferred but the t568b is more common and here we'll be using t568b because there's a label for it in our socket so i'm going to bring in our cable i've just realized i haven't cut off this piece of a cord so we'll get rid of that like that and then we're going to secure the cable down here using a cable tie so i'll get on with that there we are hopefully that will be okay and we now need to wire the wires down into the connectors here and they push into place we don't need to strip off the insulation it'll come off itself automatically and you'll see each twisted pair has got a solid wire and also a striped wire so we've got here the striped orange and the solid orange and the orange is the one we're going to start with so we'll take solid orange which goes down here according to this wiring standard we just push it down in like that and then we take our punch down tool and we punch it down i guess it's the that's where the word comes from isn't it not a difficult word to use there we are and that is nicely in the in the connector so i will get on with the others and there we are all the wires are now properly in place so i'll just remove the the excess and there we are this last little piece doesn't want to go away but uh there we are we have now got a fully wired ethernet socket and be a good idea to test this but we can't test it until we've got something terminating the other end of the cable so we'll come back to this later in the video when the socket is in its final location guess what i'm now going to wire up a patch lead an ethernet cable with a plug at each end using about a meter of our cat 7 cable i'm going to start by taking the protective sleeves for the plugs and putting those on the end of the wire and forcing it down there because if you don't do this early on you forget to do it and then you get mad at the end because you've got to cut everything off to start again so with that done let's take the crimping tool and again i need to strip off a couple of inches of wire on the end of the cable take off the protective for cover the outer coating and here i think i need i think it's 11 clicks like that hopefully this is much easier cable to work with it's only got a single outer and there we are that came off very easily indeed but as you can see here this cable is shielded so we need to remove the shielding and basically what we need to do is take the braid push it down down there like that there's an awful lot to deal with here i know we take the braid and just wind it around a little bit initially get that out of the way but then we also need to deal with the foil and i think i'm going to take off with some scissors again obviously we don't want to cut any wires we need to get rid of that's the outer foil and then we've now got our twisted pears which are also foiled so i also need to remove the foil from them as well and there we are i think we can work with that and then we now need to take the individual twisted pairs and to separate them out and to put them in the right order and again we're going to be using the standard t568b which requires us to have these in the line which is going to be orange stripe orange green stripe blue blue stripe green brown stripe brown and there we are i think i've now got the wires roughly flattened out in the right order it's a fiddly thing to do and if we go down to our plug which i've fastened to the corner of this box so i've got a hope of showing you this on camera in focus i'm going to take our wires and feed them in hopefully accurately like that and they should go in and pop out through the end and we should see they're still the right order orange stripe orange green stripe blue blue stripe green brown stripe brown they are so we can keep feeding them through our pass through connector pass through connectors are wonderful things like that we can feed that through like that and then we can take our plug and go across to our crimper where all we need to do in theory is to pass the wires through like that need to come out to the side there they have and the plug sits nicely in the clip like that make sure it's absolutely in place and all need to do now is to push down on the crimper nice and tight like that you can see on that side all the wires have been cut off and in theory we can release it and yes we've crimped a plug onto the end of our cable and we can just put into place the little plastic thing there like that and there we are that is a pretty good result we've got an ethernet cable with a plug on the end and by the magic of filmmaking our cable has now got a connector at both ends so let's bring in our cable tester and we just have to plug the cable into the sockets on the end of here plug one in there and the other one in here there we are it's all set up so we can now go to the cable tester and moment of truth turn it on like that and you'll see the lights go down in sequence and they are in the correct order so that's very good news indeed that means everything is connected up correctly and that's going at normal speed it can go at slow speed as well if we want if we want to check at a at a slower speed and so there we are we've made up a patch cable i've also shown you how to wire a socket so i think it's now time to show you my actual project and how it's being implemented greetings and welcome to a wall that's normally hidden behind an equipment rack at the side of my desk but right now both of those are moved out of the way and a wall that didn't have an ethernet socket now has an ethernet socket to fit this i went outside with a very long drill and drilled in through the wall and note when you do this you should have your drill pointing slightly upwards to avoid water ingress but sadly i didn't do that i thought i did but clearly i didn't but my final hole is very neat and i will seal it with silicon and certainly my final hole is much neater than the one drilled by the professional telecoms engineer just below it where they split the brick entirely and i avoided doing this by drilling from the outside in rather than the inside out this said on the inside i did have some plastic come off and indeed i lost more of the skin when i cut the hole for the wall box but the box went in with no problems screwed firmly into place and then i just used a bit of plaster and a bit of paint to tidy things up you might notice here i've got the cable coming through on one side at the base of the box that was my intention because it is quite difficult to bend the cable it's got a very small bending radius and that gave me the maximum chance of wiring things up okay but as you can see wired things up i did and as you can see it's now nicely in place i'm very pleased with the final result so let's take our patch cable and plug it in to the socket i can do it like that there we are that's plugged in and i'm going to plug the other end of this cable into our cable tester which i've got here we'll plug that in like that and here i've put a plug on the end of the cable which is going out to the garage the one wired to the socket i've just put into the wall i just put a temporary connector on the end of this rather difficult to do with a cable this inflexible but hopefully that will go in the top and clicking like that it has and therefore the moment of truth if we turn this on yes i seem to have got it right everything's wiped correctly in the wall and on the temporary plug cable hasn't been damaged that's working fine but i also want to do a final test which is to turn this off and to take this connector and to plug it in to the back of my router there we are and i'm now going to go out to the garage taking with me the cable now looped through the garage door it's not under the ground yet and it's plugged into this ethernet to usb3 adapter and then to my surface tablet where i'm going to run a speed test and this is of course what it's all about having a working internet connection out in my garage it should be about 45 megabits download about nine upload something like that let's see what happens looking okay because it varies across time you never know exactly what you're going to get but it looks pretty good it seems to be working clearly the basis is working we've got an internet connection here through that ethernet cable no problems at all slightly slower and i hope to not too bad actually what's it do oh no it's going to be about what i anticipated and if you're wondering you're not going to see the other end of the cable terminated in this video because i've got an electrician coming in to do all sorts of first fit electrics for my garage project in about a week's time and he's going to take the ethernet cable underground and bring it through into here and i'll wire it in when that is finished and of course i'll show you that when i do my mid-year review video which will be coming up fairly soon recently i was talking to a telecoms engineer who told me that the most common reason they're called out to a customer's home is because they've reported a slow broadband connection and i asked him how often did they actually have a slow broadband connection he said not that often he said most of the time he went into someone's home connected an easement lead to their router their router connected it to a test device or a laptop and the broadband speed was fine and the problem was the speed of the customer's wi-fi between their router and their devices and i mentioned this because so many people could get such a better internet experience better streaming of video things like that by using a wired connection between their router and their computers rather than wi-fi and i hope in that context you've found this video useful but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please plus that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 249,035

Keywords: How to wire Ethernet, Wiring RJ45, wiring Ethernet socket, wiring Ethernet plug, wiring network socket, wiring network plug, installing Ethernet, installing Ethernet extension, installing network extension, Ethernet cat, Ethernet categories, cat 6, cat6, cat6a, cat 6a, FS/FTP, UTP, choosing Ethernet cable, choosing network cable, Ethernet cable types, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, pass-through Ethernet plug, pass-through RJ45, crimp network plug, crimp Ethernet plug

Id: uFBQsUwqy_g

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021